every gift guide is the same. each focuses on the great products you can buy to make mom, dad, sis, or the boss happy. but when you get to the store, they always seem to be out of the best stuff. so you're forced to make compromises and do the best you can out of the dreck that's left. here are two handfuls of devices to avoid at any cost this holiday season, culled from the worst-scoring products we tested this year.

digital cameras: john c. dvorak seems to think that a $99 concord camera is just the ticket. well, if it's anything like the concord 5062afdon't walk, run to another product instead. this camera claims to be five megapixels, and i'm sure that in some engineering fantasy land it pushes that many electrons. at about $200, it's probably the cheapest 5mp camera you'll see. but in this case, cheap doesn't equal good. in our tests, its picture quality was barely equivalent to a 2mp camera, which can be found for much less than two benjamins. it starts up slow and cycles slower, taking more than five seconds between shots. whites were blown-out and images were overly green. if kermit the frog is on your list, then maybe. otherwise, no. our digital camera product guide has much better choices for every budget.

pda: ipaq used to stand for quality. then hp bought compaq, and you can't bet on an ipaq anymore. witness the fundamentally flawed ipaq rz1715. hp's low-end pda was designed to compete with low-cost products from dell and palm, but it lacks any of their redeeming qualities. the glacially slow processor and anemic memory make using it torture, but at least the pain is short livedbecause the battery wears out hours before the ones on comparable units do. it's a pity this ipaq's so bad, but don't saddle yourself or your friends, with this boat anchor. there are better products available for less. our pda product guide has details.

phone: samsung has built a major brand around the twin concepts of style and quality. but as we found when we tested the samsung d415, the first slider phone for cingular, style without quality just doesn't cut it. sure, the phone looks cool. but svelte it is not. in fact, our reviewer called it a "big chunky slab," which is not what i want to carry around in my pocket. it's both big and difficult to manage. the four-way navigation pad seems to have been designed by orangutans without opposable thumbs. finding a command in the menus takes longer than it took the minnow's crew to escape gilligan's island, and selecting that option requires either two hands or a stutter-step of rapid finger movement. the audio's bad, the speaker phone is muffled, and the processor is slow. think again if you're looking for a fashionable phoneand check out our phone product guide for better choices.

desktop pc: for apple, the entry-level emac really does represent think different. that's because for a company that prides itself on quality, this computer is different. as in bad. on the plus side, it's stylish. on the downside, it's slow, underpowered, and pathetic. the 40gb hard drive will fill up quickly, the lack of a dvd burner makes offloading files impossible, and the radeon 9200 graphics card won't even run this fall's hot mac games. and at around $800, this emac ain't cheap. if you're considering a home apple, think different. buy a dell. or be prepared to spend a lot more for an acceptable apple computer. our desktop product guide can lead you to the best apples, along with the best of the rest.

notebook pc: voodoo has made quite a name for itself in the enthusiast category, delivering super-fast tweaked-out boxes for gamers and power users who don't want to build their own. we've favorably reviewed a number of their pcs, and found them fast, well built, and good-looking. yes, the voodoopc envy m:380 looks good, but one out of three is not enough. at an outrageous price of over $4,000, this notebook should be spitting fire and hauling butt. instead, it just sits there and delivers less-than-stellar performance for a gaming notebook. it barely even beat sony's lame vaio a190. if you're looking for a gaming notebook, we've got better options, for less, in our laptop product guide.

multifunction printer: dell entered the printing market with a bang last year, and quickly jumped to over 16% market share in the us. but if you're looking for a multifunction printer, avoid dell's lame mfp laser printer 1600n. the output quality's ok, especially on text, but it's slower than a 330-pound defensive tackle with two bad knees on a muddy field. this is dell's first homegrown printerit got previous models from lexmarkand it shows. oh, and don't expect to use the fax machine or copy any body parts over the network when the pc connected up to the dell 1600n is shut off. that's ridiculous, especially for a network-attached device. if you're in the market for a nice multifunction printer, check out our mfp product guide, where you can find an award-winning brother for hundreds of dollars less.

mp3 players: with so many good players on the market, from apple's ipod to creative's flashy new zen micro, you really have no excuse for purchasing a bad mp3 player this season. unless you fall prey to the mp3-headphone combo scam perpetrated by tdk. the company's mojo 1 combines a tinny set of headphones with a barely usable mp3 player and a woefully inadequate 128mb of memory. and even though it claims to support both mp3 and wma, it actually plays neither! instead the pc software converts your digital music files into a third, proprietary format before copying them to the headphones. that's like watching the neighbor's tv with a periscope. bad sound, bad controls, bad software, and bad design. what else could go wrong? you can find much better choices in our mp3 product guide.

hdtv: high-definition content looks great on an hdtv, but on a regular tv, which is most of what you'll probably watch, it can look worse than an ancient philco. and that's where the ads upconverter seems a logical choice. it claims to convert dvds and over-the-air tv into video that'll stand up to real hd content. don't buy it. marred by a terrible user interface, a remote control seemingly designed by ascetic monks, and output quality that redefines gigo (good in, garbage out), it's a quick $500 flushed down the drain. for better hdtv choices, including sets with decent built-in upconverters, see our hdtv product guide.

camcorder: the tiny size and supposed flexibility of fisher's fvd-c1 would seem to make it an amazing video-camera choice. and it is, if you're lucky enough to have perfect lighting, love the bundled ulead editing software, and have oodles of money to burn on buying additional sd cards. for everyone else, including our user reviewers, this product stinks. with a severe allergy to fluorescent lights, a zoom control more twitchy than jennifer tilly in seed of chucky, and a bizarre incompatibility with all but the bundled video editor, it's destined for an early trip to the slag heap. and at more than $700, it's not a cheap toss-off. you'll find much better choices in our video camera product guide, many of them for far less than this twisted offspring of a norelco shaver and a $50 webcam.

Related

wireless: home networking has been all the rage this year, as families connect pcs around the house with televisions, stereos, game players, and more. you'd think that with a name like "gigafast," the wf717-apr router would deliver a great performance, but you'd be gigawrong. buy this one and you'll end up gigasad in no time. that's because it delivered some of the worst long-distance numbers we saw all year, dropping out after only 120 feet. that means it'll hardly penetrate from the office to the bathroom, let alone to the kids' room upstairs. it's also gigabuggythe router needed to be rebooted before disconnected machines could reconnect to the network. and without support for the new wpa security scheme, it practically invites the neighborhood hackers into your network. that's not just gigabad, it's hellabad. we've tested scores of hubs and routers that performed better. just stop by our wireless product guide for details.

that's it for this year's top ten list of products to avoid. have a gigahappy holiday, and remember: it might be the thought that counts, but if the gear is bad, the thought doesn't matter a nanobit.

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About the Author

With more than 20 years experience in consulting, technology, computers and media, Jim Louderback has pioneered many significant new innovations.
While building computer systems for Fortune 100 companies in the '80s, Jim developed innovative client-server computing models, implementing some of the first successful LAN-based client-server syste... See Full Bio

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